This invention relates to the treatment of dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, in particular Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body dementia and vascular dementia.
Dementia is the progressive decline in cognitive functions beyond what may be expected from normal aging. One form of dementia is Alzheimer's disease (AD), also called Alzheimer disease, senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) or simply Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's disease is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain primarily diagnosed in people over 65 years of age. About 24 million people worldwide suffer from dementia and 60% of these people have Alzheimer's disease. It is expected that the number of Alzheimer patients is noticeably rising due to the increasing expectation of lifetime. Another type of dementia is Lewy body dementia, characterized by a different pathology with subcortical and cortical Lewy body formation. It has a high prevalence close to 30% and an incidence 4-6 times higher than in an age-matched general population. Compared with Alzheimer's disease, central cholinergic deficits occur earlier and are more pronounced and widespread in Lewy body dementia. But coexisting Alzheimer's disease pathology with amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles is seen in 72% of these patients. Basal forebrain degeneration is also a key feature in the course of Alzheimer's disease and the impairment of basal forebrain input has been associated with the pathogenesis of protein aggregation. These results emphasize the key role of the basal nucleus of Meynert in both types of dementia. Another common form of dementia is vascular dementia, which is a group of syndromes characterized by different vascular pathologies and mechanisms.
Clinical presentation of Alzheimer's disease is characterized by loss of memory and decline of cognition, reasoning, judgment and orientation. As the disease progresses, motor, sensory and language abilities are also affected until there is global impairment of multiple cognitive functions. Alzheimer's disease is associated with neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques.
For these and other reasons there is a need for the present invention.